The Vera Institute of Justice and CUNY Graduate Center invite applications for Summer Fellows who will be based in Vera’s New York City office. These $4,000 fellowships will be offered to Graduate Center Ph.D. students from any program with research interests in criminal or immigration justice and the work of the Vera Institute. The primary responsibilities of the award winners will be to collaborate with researchers in one of Vera’s 4 centers or programs on research relating to a specific project, including but not limited to data collection, analysis, fieldwork, report writing, stakeholder engagement, and dissemination.

While Vera’s centers and programs span the criminal legal system, Vera is offering CUNY Fellows projects in select areas. Please see the list of potential projects below and indicate in your application which project or projects are most relevant to your experience and interest. If you are interested in more than one project, be sure to fill out the last page of this document, listing those projects in order of preference. While you can apply for up to 3 projects, successful applicants will be assigned to work with one initiative over the course of the fellowship.

Fellowship recipients will work with their assigned initiative for 120 hours over the summer of 2023. While there is some flexibility in remote working, fellows will be expected to work onsite at Vera’s offices in Sunset Park Brooklyn for at least 60 hours over the course of the summer in line with Vera’s hybrid schedule. In addition, recipients will be required to attend a welcome reception at the beginning of the fellowship, to do a brief presentation on their work at the end of the summer and write a blog post about their experiences before the end of the Fall 2023 semester.

To apply please send a letter of interest describing your research interests and related experience with specific reference to one of the projects described below, a C.V., a current Graduate Center transcript (you may submit the unofficial student copy that can be printed from banner), and a letter of support from your primary advisor.

Research at Vera

Vera’s research is an essential component of our work to deliver justice and end mass incarceration. Our research is founded on social science principles of independence and methodological rigor and designed to deliver the knowledge that will lead to real world impact. Vera researchers generate and interpret the evidence required to understand problems, develop solutions, shift policies, and change beliefs and norms that perpetuate inequity and impede justice.

Vera researchers work as part of inter-disciplinary teams to develop and implement theories of change that weave together research, advocacy, communications, and site-based technical assistance (TA). We conceptualize issues and collect the evidence that is needed to understand problems, highlight inequities, design interventions, and advocate for transformative change. With impact at the fore, we work with our teammates and allies to ensure that the knowledge we produce reaches decision-makers in a format that is designed to spur action.

 

 

Instructions for submitting your application on Greenhouse:

1. Please combine the below materials (except for the letter of recommendation) into a SINGLE file (saved as either a Word or PDF file).
   1. Letter of Interest describing your research interests and related experience with specific reference to one of the projects described below (not to exceed 2 pages)
   2. Resume
   3. Current Graduate Center transcript (you may submit the unofficial student copy that can be printed from banner)
   4. Letter of support from your primary advisor to be emailed to sassadian@vera.org
   5. Use the following format when naming your document: Last Name, First Name, GC Program
   6. If you are applying to more than one center or program, be sure to include page 4 with the rest of your materials.
2. Upload your application onto Greenhouse: https://boards.greenhouse.io/closedpoolvera/jobs/4169918005

Instructions for Faculty Recommenders

1. Prepare your reference letter as a Word or PDF file.
2. Please use the following format when naming your document: Student Last Name, First Name
3. Email your file directly to Shirin Assadian: sassadian@vera.org

 

Application Deadline: Friday, March 17^th, 2023

 

Questions? Please reach out!

Shirin Assadian (she/her)

Coordinator, Research

Vera Institute of Justice

t 646-753-9472

e sassadian@vera.org

 

Summer Fellowship Initiatives:

 

1) Ending Detention Initiative

Ending mass incarceration is not possible without ending immigration detention. The most common types of ICE detention facilities are local jails or similar facilities owned by local or state governments that rent detention capacity to ICE – providing a perverse incentive for local jurisdictions to preserve or expand facility beds and offset the cost of high incarceration rates. The scale, punitiveness, and racism of the immigration and criminal legal systems are mutually reinforcing and intertwined, yet there is limited research at the intersections of these two systems.

Vera seeks a research fellow to an interdisciplinary team of researchers, data scientists, and legal experts working to produce evidence in support of ending detention, create data-driving tools for advocates, and shape an understanding of mass detention as an extension of mass incarceration. The fellow is likely to be involved in creating a special report or data visualization to share findings with the public. Depending on the candidates’ experience and interest, this research fellowship may be involve quantitative or qualitative methodology, such as:

Quantitative: conducting exploratory and causal analysis with ICE detention and jails data. Candidates should be comfortable working with large datasets in programming languages such as R, Python, or Stata.

Qualitative: analyzing primary and secondary sources (e.g., DHS and local/state government documents, public statements, detention contracts, detention standards, reports, available literature)

Vera welcomes applications from students from all academic backgrounds (e.g., social science, geography, economics, computer science, mathematics). Applicants with experiences with the immigration system are especially encouraged to apply.

 

2) Ending Girls’ Incarceration

Vera is leading a national initiative to end of girls’ incarceration in the US. We partner with government and community leaders across the country to disrupt the unique pathways leading girls and gender expansive youth into the juvenile justice system and into confinement. The number of youth in the girls’ side of the juvenile justice system is small, most girls are unjustly locked up to protect their safety or to address unmet needs, and jurisdictions across the country are finally ready to commit to gender-responsive systems change.

Vera seeks research fellows to help advance four major research projects:

1. a mixed methods evaluation of an innovative diversion program designed in collaboration with New York City’s Administration for Children’s Services, Rising Ground, Girls for Gender Equity, and New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development
2. a mixed methods study of Juvenile Electronic Monitoring in partnership with Berkeley University, Young Women’s Freedom Center, and other community-based partners
3. a data collection effort on the national scope of girls’ incarceration across states and selected local jurisdictions
4. a data-based training and technical assistance project supporting a network of county-based system actors in affecting and evaluating policy/practice change.

Working closely with our small research team and the partners mentioned above, the research fellow(s) will conduct interviews, co-facilitate focus groups, merge and recode juvenile system (probation, jail, and child welfare) data; conduct descriptive analysis; organize and format output; document analysis; manage codebooks; write research memos, and document statistical software code. The ideal candidate will have a combination of intermediate quantitative and qualitative skills, including coding unstructured interview and observation data, sorting, querying, and recoding numeric data, producing and interpreting descriptive statistics, simple data visualization, and managing output and graphical files. Some experience or interest in GIS would be helpful. Good verbal and written communication skills are a must.

 

3) Greater Justice New York

Greater Justice New York (GJNY) is an interdisciplinary team that tackles the drivers of mass criminalization and mass incarceration in New York. New York State is a microcosm of the landscape of incarceration across our country—arrests and the number of people in jail in large, urban areas like New York City are declining while a quiet but significant incarceration boom is under way in more rural parts of the state. New York is experiencing a unique moment. Pretrial and bail reform, declining crime rates, and policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have dramatically decreased the state’s jail population—which dropped in June 2020 to the lowest point in generations. We use research, policy, and advocacy to shine a light on injustices in all areas of the state and in all aspects of the criminal system—from bail to sentencing, parole, fines and fees, and more—and drive change through piloting innovative solutions and providing technical assistance. Our vision is a leaner, fairer, and more effective justice system where incarceration is the last resort, not the default, across all 62 counties of New York State.

Vera is seeking a qualitative research fellow who will work collaboratively with GJNY staff to conduct qualitative research on key issues in the criminal-legal system including but not limited to evaluating bail reform using court observation and interviews with court actors; a Participatory Action Research (PAR) project collaborating with directly impacted individuals to improve pretrial justice; expanding community-based pretrial services in New York; and creating a roadmap for reduced jail and prison staffing. The fellow will gain training from research staff on qualitative methodology (e.g., interviewing), community-based research, project logistics, and writing reports for a mix of audiences. GJNY welcomes applications from applicants who are passionate about racial, economic, and social justice and who want to explore ways to achieve this through research and practice. Applicants with experience with the criminal-legal system are especially encouraged to apply.

 

 

4) In Our Backyards / Jails Team

Vera’s jails initiative (In Our Backyards + Jail Decarceration teams) is seeking an Applied Justice Research Fellow to support its research team. This initiative employs quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore the causes, as well as the social, economic, and political implications, of detention in local county jails, community supervision (such as probation), and the criminalization of poverty. We combine research with technical assistance and communications work, in collaboration with community advocates and government agencies, to build, implement, and evaluate reforms that reduce carceral control and improve community health and safety. In the coming year, the team is building a comprehensive approach in several focus states, connecting local-level and state-level work, especially on pretrial justice issues.

Research fellows will contribute to all aspects of the team’s research work, including landscaping policy and research opportunities and designing projects with local partners; accessing, cleaning, and analyzing local agency data (such as jail booking and probation data); generating and analyzing primary data (such as survey, interviews, ethnography); writing and editing reports; and translating research findings in accessible ways to different audiences.

For some examples of the team’s recent work: In Our Backyards Stories, The Criminalization of Poverty in Tennessee, People in Jail and Prison in Spring 2021, and reports from the Rural Jails Research and Policy Network in Washington and Georgia. For more information on the county-level historical jail and prison data that the fellow can leverage, see https://github.com/vera-institute/incarceration-trends. For more information on In Our Backyards, see https://www.vera.org/projects/in-our-backyards.

Students from all academic disciplines with demonstrated experience studying incarceration are encouraged to apply. Some prior experience with quantitative and/or qualitative data analysis required; prior experience with R and/or Atlas.ti preferred but not required.

 

5) Redefining Public Safety

The goal of Vera’s Redefining Public Safety program is to narrow the scope of policing and strengthen investments in a robust and equitable civilian public safety ecosystem, in areas including violence intervention, neighborhood safety, and crisis response programs.

A fellow would have the opportunity to contribute to several projects intended to inform the field of public safety and support our site-based work. This includes using archival and interview methods to produce a landscape analysis of the structure and efficacy of Offices of Violence Prevention and Neighborhood Safety; expanding our analysis of 911 data with a focus on equity and anti-racism; providing data technical assistance and community-centered research to support metric tracking of our site-based work, especially as it relates to behavioral health and civilian crisis response; and budgetary, interview, field, and desk research to inform implementation of civilian-led ecosystems of public safety.

Fellows will have the opportunity to apply and enhance applied research skills in generating research findings; translating research findings for practitioners, advocates, and changemakers; and collaborating with site partners and community stakeholders. Fellows with strong writing skills, interest in racial equity and quantitative and/or qualitative analysis, and interest or experience with collaborative and participatory research methods are encouraged to apply.

 

 

6) Reshaping Prosecution

The Reshaping Prosecution initiative at Vera is partnering with reform-minded prosecutors across the country to help them rethink their role in delivering justice and pursuing public safety and to put their campaign promises into action as concrete, data-informed policies and practices. The goal of these partnerships is to develop strategies for prosecutors to reduce the criminal legal footprint and its negative consequences by decentering prosecution and punishment as solutions to social problems; promoting racial equity in their work; and increasing the public’s confidence in their office.

In addition to working directly with prosecutors’ offices, we partner with community-based organizations (CBOs) and people who are directly impacted by the criminal legal system by collaborating on research projects and advocacy campaigns. We work to elevate the voices of our community partners as well as their visions for safe and thriving communities. By sharing knowledge as well as research skills and storytelling tools, we hope to equip community members to keep prosecutors accountable for their policies and actions.

Our approach to research is participatory and includes both quantitative and qualitative data analysis. A key component of our participatory action research (PAR) approach is training community members in various research methods. Upon being trained, community members act as co-researchers in the process of data gathering, analysis, and interpretation around questions related to public safety in their neighborhoods.

We have two fellowship opportunities:

1. Qualitative story mapping

We are looking for a student in the social sciences (or a related discipline) with knowledge of and experience in GIS (Geographical Information Systems) and GIS software (ArcGIS or QGIS). The fellow will help develop and implement a participatory story mapping component for our work with community members that uses data to uplift individual and collective neighborhood narratives. The fellow should be comfortable navigating mapping platforms and using and sharing those skills in a participatory process.

Examples of story mapping projects include:

Where We were Safe: Mapping Resilience in the 1970s Salsa Scene

If Coastlands Could Talk, a Story of Lincoln, Ontario

Embattled Borderlands

Community and Environmental Mapping in Simeto Valley

 

2. Mapping and other visualizations of quantitative findings

The starting point for our quantitative analysis is the administrative data from prosecutors’ case management systems. Among many other factors of cases, the data may include defendants’ addresses or locations of the incident (to be converted more generally to neighborhoods). The fellow will focus on adding geographic elements to our data analysis by building prototype maps. The fellow will also develop the team’s mapping capabilities by drafting best practices and a guide on the mapping process.

The fellow will work closely with our team of researchers to:

• Source place-based datasets to combine with Reshaping Prosecution’s findings. These could include health, housing, opportunity, education, built environment, and poverty measures
• Establish associations with Reshaping Prosecution’s findings and utilize maps to make the case for policies that promote safety and reduce the front-end of prosecution
• Imagine other creative visualizations of quantitative and geographical findings.

The fellow will be dedicated to working closely with system-impacted community members, embrace challenges to established frameworks of knowledge, and be eager to support us in advancing an action-driven research agenda.

 

 

 

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